Businesses use profit, generally the difference between income and expenses, as a quantified unit of measure representing the state of a businesses, and thus, profit represents a motivating factor for fiscal decisions within a business context. Profit is often distributed to the owners or investors and thus, often leaves the pool of funds attributed to the business. For the purpose of discussion, reinvestment of income, i.e., the purchase of an asset, is treated as an expense. In addition, profit can be used to develop management and accounting systems and can be used to evaluate a business for investment purposes.
However, people do not have a profit motive. In contrast to businesses, people make fiscal choices based on personal goals and desires. Prior systems attempt to evaluate the fiscal state of individuals using business accounting principles, often substituting savings for profit. For the individual, income and expenses are derived from a lifetime pool of funds and the difference does not represent a profit-like measure that can be distributed to an outside entity. Moreover, savings by itself does not motivate most individual's behavior. Absent a unit of measure, conventional personal management systems fail to quantify the effect of fiscal choices on personal goals and desires and fail to provide a way for individuals to evaluate the state of their finances.
As such, a new system for evaluating the finances of an individual would be desirable.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.